Both Thomas Hardy's poem, "The Man He Killed" and Randall
Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" focus on the theme of the futility and
senselessness, and waste of war. In Hardy's poem, for example, the speaker states that
he shot the man "because---because," as though searching for a reason,
he
was my
foe,Just so: my foe of course he
was;That's clear
enough;....
However, just
like the speaker, the man enlisted because he was out of work and had no other reason.
Likewise, in Jerrell's poem, there is no real reason for the turret gunner's being in
the war other than his coming from his "mother's sleep" and "falling into the State."
And, he "hunched in its belly" until he is ready to fire the gun. His death, too, is
senseless; and, he must be "washed out of the turret with a
hose."
Hardy makes use of ambiguous pronouns so that the
reader does not know whether the narrator who relays the story of the two men, or the
first or second man are speaking. This ironic confusion of the three
points of view illustrates the senseless killing of one when all the men are essentially
the same. In Jarrell's short poem there is also an ambiguity; it is in the manhood of
the soldier who remains in a fetal position and is destroyed beyond
recognition:
readability="6">
When I died, they washed me out of the turret
with a hose.
As in the "Man
He Killed," the theme of unrecognition is prevalent.
No comments:
Post a Comment